total revenue for rocklands $us17.8 billion, page-84

RNF, you feel that you have an advantage having actually visited the site. My view (and I’m sure this won’t surprise you ?) is the opposite.

I went on a mine visit once. We saw the stuff being dug out of the ground, crushed, stacked, leached, full access to the CEO, mine manager, geo, truck driver …. All questions answered. Retired into the town for a bite to eat. The lawyer of the party disappeared to canvas the local population, visiting the local newspaper, newsagent, café and came back saying the whole town was really confident in the project (most of the employees lived there, no FIFO), it would be $1 by Xmas (price was 30c, in May) and they’d all be rich with the dividends. Production problems ensued. Between then and Xmas the company had a convertible note issue, and at Xmas a CR at 20c. By August of next year it was in administration. Re-emerging after a 20:1 consolidation it now trades at 0.3c ($0.003).

So, what went wrong? How could most of a group of investors including a lawyer, bullion dealer, accountant etc. etc. be fooled so easily? Some of us got together later on and tried to analyse it. The lawyer (a courtroom lawyer, not a conveyancer or divorce guy) admitted that he’d been swayed by the enthusiasm of everyone he spoke to (cross examined, might be a better term!). Nobody had any doubts. The bullion dealer felt that the total confidence with which questions were answered created a sense of security. Was anyone lying to us? No, we didn’t think that at all. Everyone was fully behind the project. Were there any unanswered questions? Yes. But only because we hadn’t asked them. We should probably have wanted more detail on how the extraction was going, as it was in its early stages – there had been slight discussion, but looking back we felt that the CEO might have steered the conversation away from that area.

So, after that example I decided, no more site visits. It is way too easy to see what you want to see, be told what you want to hear and generally get caught up in the exuberance of a project you’ve been invested in and followed closely for six years, which is finally in production.

It is also easy to mix up what you actually see, as ozblue found out. In his initial post the mine manager picked up a 52kg nugget. But it seems that it was actually still in the wall of the mine, so nobody would be able to tell how big it was anyway.

ozblue
Post #: 9948046
“Mine manager picks up a chunk of Ncu and states this is the 2% of this cubic metre”

ozblue
Post #: 9953046
“The proverbial nugget picked by the mine manager, wasin his hands still in the wall of the mine.”

GFM gets confused by 2% of a tonne and 2% of a cubic metre, and RNF swears blind that he and GFM read a 88 page document together in great detail when it was only 26 pages long.

Not having a go at you, folks, just current examples of how easy it is to get swept up in the excitement.

Nor am I suggesting for a moment that CDU could possibly go down the same track – this post is about how the impressions and knowledge gained form a site visit can be unreliable and incomplete. Better in my experience to go by facts and data from company announcements.